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2002–2010: Regulated commercialization

Regulated commercialization

Commercial uses, social effects

In April 2002, an interdepartmental group of municipal bureaucrats took charge of Folkets park’s renewal and management. This group was scheduled to pass on this task to a more permanent organization managed under the Streets Department by January 2005 and because of this provisional status it became known as Projekt Folkets park. Since the park’s renewal did not work as smoothly as had been imagined in 2001, Projekt Folkets park’s mandates were extended by two years to stretch up until January 2007. This means that the group’s activities almost entirely overlapped with the Vinterland project. 463

Both Projekt Folkets park and Vinterland became increasingly enmeshed with the early 2000s preoccupation with regional competition for human capital through attractive space. The types of use these two bodies of bureaucrats were faced with representing and regulating were, however, very different. Therefore, the parallel cases illustrate the different ways that social neoliberalism was taking shape in the exact same time and place. Comparing them serves as a reminder that there might be fundamental tensions within a bureaucratic formation even as it is emerging.

Just as with Vinterland, Projekt Folkets park was deeply shaped by tensions between social ways of representing uses of public space as either local or regional and the way in which this distinction was linked to recreation and entertainment.

463 Because it operated outside and across the normal bureaucratic structures, only fragments of Projekt Folkets park’s paperwork are archived, but its work can be followed through the working papers collected in the personal files of one of its members.

These categories were, as shown in Chapter 6, crucial in the 2001 subcommittee memo on an ‘experience center for an expanding region’ that led up to the creation of Projekt Folkets park. The priority of regional competition for new visitors through commercial entertainment that the 2001 memo had built on was, however, tempered by the final political decision that amended the proposal and provided the new management groups with its formal mandate. This amendment clearly designated local-recreational uses as the most important ones for Projekt Folkets park. The new management was also asked to ‘strengthen’ the park’s ‘regional role and market [itself] in terms of entertainment, conferences, etc’, but only as long as this didn’t threaten Folkets park’s primary role as a local recreational green space.464

The most important difference between Projekt Folkets park and Vinterland was that the new management group was responsible for coordinating efforts among the park’s private leaseholders. A large proportion of the park’s cultural activities that the Projekt group was to coordinate were, by 2002, connected to commercial firms in one way or another. Projekt Folkets park was thus forced to draw on market forces in the park’s renewal, unlike Vinterland, which came to pursue this agenda outside, and to some degree against, the park’s commercial uses.

Managing tensions between social and economic planning practices and uses — an issue which had undone so many earlier neoliberal renewal plans — thus became a crucial task for Projekt Folkets park.

The ‘entertainment center’ memo had understood the ‘burning interest’ of commercial firms as a powerful renewal dynamic that explained the relationship between regional visitors to Folkets park and commercial entertainment.465 Despite their mandate to focus on local uses and users, this understanding of commercial forces as powerful agents of renewal also shaped the Projekt Folkets park group’s work. The November 2001 amendment to the memo made any large-scale, rapid privatization of the park impossible, forcing any turn to commercial forces to be gradual. Folkets park’s new management had inherited a model for renewal that relied on commercial forces as a key driver of attractive space, but also a political situation that limited both the use of such economic means.

These preconditions made the park’s existing firms a strategic resource for making this public space attractive on a regional scale. Just a year after Bo01’s early setbacks, and months after the heated debate about Folkets park, the Projekt group had all but forgotten about their official mandate to tone down regional completion through commercialization. Instead, the newly appointed management

464 Malmö stad, Tekniska nämndens arkiv, Minutes of Tekniska nämnden 13th november 2001 §184,

‘Förslag till omorganisation av verksamheten i Folkets park’, p. 3-4, 6.

465 Malmö stad, Tekniska nämndens arkiv, Minutes of Tekniska nämnden 26th February 2001 §50,

‘Malmö Folkets park – ett upplevelsecentrum i en expanderande region, utredning om Malmö Folkets park, Remissutgåva 2001-02-19’, p. 42.

group immediately began to treat the park’s existing commercial entertainment firms as a strategic resource for urban development. While Vinterland from 2002 onwards had focused on attracting desirable demographics to Folkets park and abandoned any hope of using commercial forces to do so, Projekt Folkets park illustrated an alternative model that relied on economic practices to realize the same neoliberal social vision. Projekt Folkets park’s gradual turn to visions of attractive space through commercial entertainment would, in the years that followed, articulate deep contradictions with the group’s careful representations of what demographic effects commercial actors had on the park’s everyday use.

Tensions between Projekt Folkets park’s reliance on the economic self-activity of the private sector and the groups visions of demographic changes in the park’s pattern of use can be tracked from the very first draft for a strategic renewal plan written by the new management group. This plan, written in the spring of 2002, divided the group’s work into three discrete categories. The first category was marked by the first Vinterland project — held a few months before — in that it was concerned with reinforcing the park’s municipally-sponsored cultural events program. A second category related to more strategic and better-funded public relations strategy for the park and its many stakeholders, including commercial firms. Finally, a third category of tasks defined by this group concerned the fact that the park’s outdoor environment was still run down and required physical renewal efforts.466

All these tasks articulated tensions between visions of attractive space and the market as a tool to achieve this end. This can, for instance, be seen in Projekt Folkets park’s efforts to organize a cultural events program. Representations of the park’s actual commercial actors, even in these early drafts, clearly marked a difference with the model of market-driven attractive space. The underlying assumption when approaching the cultural events program was that commercial entertainment would attract new visitors to Folkets park, but that the rhythm with which the commercial forces operated was opportunistic and reinforced existing patterns of everyday use. To make sure that the park offered a ‘varied program throughout both the summer and winter season’, Projekt Folkets park had to compensate for the market’s cyclical consumption patterns. The project group thus had to focus on organizing free cultural events during the winter and on weekdays to counteract the market’s bias.467

A similar tension marked the same plan’s discussions of the park’s public relations strategy. The drives and abilities of commercial actors to attract new demographics were represented in both suspicious and enthusiastic terms. Certain kinds of marketing tactics of the park’s commercial forces were to be encouraged

466 Malmö stad, Arrangemangsenheten, Personal files of Sverker Haraldsson, Malmö Folkets park – Organisation och projektbeskrivning, p. 6-9.

467 Malmö stad, Arrangemangsenheten, Personal files of Sverker Haraldsson, Malmö Folkets park – Organisation och projektbeskrivning, p. 6.

and others discouraged by leveraging the sizable park-wide public relations budget to promote certain kinds of market behaviors. The rather short public relations plan emphasized at three different points that all firms renting space in the park were going to be called to meetings on a regular basis, and that participation was mandatory for those wanting their events to be included in the municipal public relations efforts. While the park’s commercial actors were seen as crucial to attracting new visitors, only those willing to be disciplined and contribute to the new management group’s ideal mix of cultural events could expect to have their publicity paid by Projekt Folkets park.468 The common theme in all these discussions was a tension between market forces’ potential to attract new and desirable types of visitors, and the means that the planners felt was necessary to achieve this end. These tensions were, however, only minor glitches compared to massive contradictions articulated as Projekt Folkets park began to draw on commercial firms in the park’s physical renewal, the third task defined in the new management’s renewal strategy.

Contradictions of commercial entertainment

The Projekt Folkets park group’s first large-scale renewal project that came to rely on, and articulate contradictions with, commercial uses was inviting firms to make bids on setting up fairground rides in the park. The disastrous 1980s amusement park plan had caused the immense debts that forced the social democratic municipal majority to buy the park and turn it into an actual public green space, as discussed in Chapter 4. All the parks’ rides but one had been sold off in the early 1990s, but a private firm had leased space for a few smaller fairground rides and a Ferris Wheel during much of the 1990s.469 This rather modest amusement park was, according to a large phone poll conducted by Gallup on behalf of Projekt Folkets park during the summer of 2002, the ‘attraction’ that led to the highest number of visits to the park.470

Based on this dataset Projekt Folkets park envisioned a larger amusement park as an important step to attract more visitors. A plan was quickly drawn up to increase the number of rides to at least 20, and letters sent out to carousel operators in the hope of getting half a dozen bids.471 However, Projekt Folkets

468 Malmö stad, Arrangemangsenheten, Personal files of Sverker Haraldsson, Malmö Folkets park – Organisation och projektbeskrivning, p. 5, 6, 8.

469 Malmö stad, Gatukontoret, Stadsträdgårdsmästarens ritningsarkiv, Binder marked ‘Folkets park II’, Intresseanmälan, Tivoli- och Lotteriverksamhet, Malmö Folkets park, no pagination [1].

470 Malmö stad, Arrangemangsenheten, Personal files of Sverker Haraldsson, Malmö stads Folkets park, Utvärdering av sommarsäsongen 2002, p. 6.

471 Malmö stad, Gatukontoret, Stadsträdgårdsmästarens ritningsarkiv, Binder marked ‘Folkets park II’, Underlag för kontrakt med arrendatorerna med utomhusverksamheten, 2002, no pagination [1].

park only received two bids. One was from Cederholms, the local company that had leased space in the park for amusement rides since 1999, and one from the much larger company Axels Tivoli. The differences between the rides that the two companies suggested to place in the park were described as ‘minimal’, but one can detect a clear difference in tone of their cover letters.472 The international fun fair giant Axels emphasized that their company had the ‘biggest travelling amusement park’ in Scandinavia and the ‘knowledge of what was popular on the market’.473 Cederholms’ letter instead drew on the 1990s local planning discourse focused on inclusion of the immediate community, which they must have been well familiar with from their years in Folkets park. In their pitch, Cederholms stressed that they wanted the park to be ‘for the benefit of all’ and that they therefore wanted to

‘maintain low prices for the rides’.474

These different perspectives on accessibility did not register in the discussions transcribed in the minutes of Projekt Folkets park, indicating that local uses were already being eclipsed by visions of increased demographic attractiveness. Neither was the popularity of Cederholms rides that the Gallup poll had identified mentioned in this discussion. What turned out to be the deciding factor was instead Axels Tivoli’s willingness to pay a lease almost four times that of Cederholms’.

Axels Tivoli’s bid was unanimously accepted by the Projekt Folkets park group meeting in December 2002.475 This short term increase in revenue streams was entangled with the idea of the strictly commercial Axels’ having more incentives to make making Folkets park a more attractive place, which the park’s 2002 annual report made clear by emphasizing a larger amusement park as a makeover for the entire park rather than a boost to Projekt Folkets park’s budget.476

The great expectations kept growing as the 2003 season crept closer. When in January Axels Tivoli announced that ‘Northern Europe’s largest Ferris wheel’, measuring a full 45 meters, was on its way to Folkets park, local tabloids rejoiced at the addition to Malmö’s skyline477 The park again made headlines a few months later, this time in the largest regional newspaper Sydsvenskan, where Axels’

owners boasted that their rides would compete with the much larger amusement parks in Copenhagen.478 Some months later the park’s new tenants again made the

472 Malmö stad, Arrangemangsenheten, Personal files of Sverker Haraldssson, Styrgrupp Projekt Folkets Park, Extramöte den 5 december 2002 kl. 10.00-10.45, no pagination [2].

473 Malmö stad, Gatukontoret, Stadsträdgårdsmästarens ritningsarkiv, Binder marked ‘Folkets park II’, Störst och festligast! Axels tivoli, 2003, no pagination [3].

474 Malmö stad, Gatukontoret, Stadsträdgårdsmästarens ritningsarkiv, Binder marked ‘Folkets park II’, Mycket Nöje med Cederholms tivoli, Intresseanmälan arrendeavtal Tivoli & Lotteriverksamhet år 2002 [sic], 2003, no pagination [14].

475 Malmö stad, Arrangemangsenheten, Personal files of Sverker Haraldssson, Styrgrupp Projekt Folkets Park, Extramöte den 5 december 2002 kl. 10.00-10.45, no pagination [2].

476 Malmö stad, Gatukontoret, Stadsträdgårdsmästarens ritningsarkiv, Binder marked ‘Folkets park II’, Malmö Folkets park, Verksamhetsberättelse 1 april-31 december 2002, förslag 030313, p. 6

477 ‘Högsta Pariserhjulet till Malmö i vår’, Kvällsposten, January 30th 2003, p. 31.

478 ‘Folkets park får nya attraktioner’, Sydsvenska dagbladet, March 19th 2003, p. C10.

newspapers again. Axels’ blatant commercialism, with ‘airbrushed quasi-pornographic girls’ on its ticket booths and rides, became the hook for a longer Sydsvenskan story about ‘Sweden’s oldest People’s park coming to terms with a new identity’.479

Looking at these, and other, mostly enthusiastic local press clippings, it would appear that opting for Axels not only had made economic sense. It also seemingly confirmed the hypothesis that commercial forces ‘burning interest’ in attracting more customers was indeed the powerful tool for making the park more attractive it had been made out to be.480 The same theory was developed in Projekt Folkets park’s 2003 annual report. This document identified the combination of the Projekt’s own efforts to beautify the park and Axels’ new rides as the main factors contributing to what, through phone polls, was identified as an amazing 50%

increase in total visitors — almost half of which were from the increasingly sought-after suburban and tourist target audiences.481

This initial enthusiasm soon warped into a more troubled relationship between commerce and attractive space. The first instance of Axels’ being represented as a planning problem demanding intervention was in the working papers of the architecture firm Svenska Landskap that had been commissioned to create a new informal plan for proceeding with the park’s physical renewal in 2002.482 A short file on Axels contained a map of how to place the rides for the coming season, and two pages with photographs of the different rides. Most of the photos focused on the recurring theme of airbrushed paintings of semi-nude women covering several of the rides that the Sydsvenskan story also had remarked on. The only comments made in this draft was a brief note: ‘proposal: do something about the somewhat tacky “decorations” of booths and attractions’.483 Whether the tacky paintings ever were discussed with Axels is uncertain. This type of ethnographic mode of representation would however continue to identify troublesome uses of space associated with the company’s attitude to doing business in a way that called into question the whole logic that the competitive drives of commercial forces were contributing to making public space attractive.

479 ‘Nya takter i Folkets park’, Sydsvenska dagbladet, June 26th 2003, p. B4-5.

480 Kvällsposten, April 2nd 2003, p. 21, ‘Fritt fall ska locka’; Sydsvenska dagbladet, April 6th 2003, p. C4, ‘Malmö ska få gigantiskt Pariserjul’; Kvällsposten, June 25th 2003, ‘Ur led är tiden – tomten är här!’.

481 Malmö stad, Arrangemangsenheten, Personal files of Sverker Haraldssson, Malmö Folkets park, verksamhetsberättelse 1 januari – 31 december 2003, p. 9. The same point is made in Malmö stad, Arrangemangsenheten, Personal files of Sverker Haraldssson, Folkets park – projektet 2002-2006, utvärdering och förslag till huvudmannaskap för en fortsatt verksamhet, 2006-03-31, 2006 p. 15.

482 Malmö stad, Gatukontoret, Stadsträdgårdsmästarens ritningsarkiv, Binder marked ‘Folkets park – Svenska landskap’; On Svenska Landskap see: Malmö stad, Arrangemangsenheten, Personal files of Sverker Haraldssson, Malmö Folkets park, verksamhetsberättelse 1 januari – 31 december 2003, p.

8. 483 Malmö stad, Gatukontoret, Stadsträdgårdsmästarens ritningsarkiv, Binder marked ‘Folkets park – Svenska landskap’, Tivolit – åkattraktioner placering.

Traces of how Axels’ business practices forced itself on Projekt Folkets park’s renewal schemes can be noted again three years later. In a section with newspaper clippings in a Projekt Folkets park binder mostly concerned with public relations materials, the articles with smiling face of Axels’ CEO talking about the excellent prospects for their third season in Folkets park were interrupted by a different topic. A print-out from Swedish National Radio’s website with the headline

‘Romanian workers getting low wages’ quoted migrant workers talking about 80 hour workweeks with less than a tenth of the union-negotiated minimum wage, paid in cash to evade tax.484 After an unrelated clipping that coincidently also concerned bad business practices in Folkets park (albeit in the form of underage drinking and fist fights at Amiralen), there follows a handwritten list of negative TV and radio items covering Axels’ Malmö branch.

The last line of this note reads ‘LO + Axels Tivoli’, referring to the social democratic central union confederation Landsorganisationen, commonly abbreviated ‘LO’. While Landsorganisationen isn’t mentioned in any of the files’

other clippings, what the cryptic note referred to can easily be identified when looking outside Projekt Folkets park’s fragmentary archives. The powerful union confederation responded to allegations directed at Axels by releasing a statement saying that they had cancelled their 2005 annual ‘family days’ that were to take place in Folkets park. The movement that once had help found the park could ‘not with any credibility’ invite their members and families to a place that only days before had made national headlines with its blatant exploitation of unorganized labor, as their spokesperson explained in the Kvällsposten tabloid.485 Malmö City’s Head Gardener and member of the Projekt Folkets park management group, was reported to have called Axels’ CEO to discuss whether tax fraud — suggested by the allegation of Axel paying employees their meager salaries cash-in-hand — constituted a breach of contract with Folkets park that merited evicting the firm from the park. Pressure increased further as the security risks associated with overworked workers who couldn’t communicate with the amusement park’s customers in Swedish or English also became a topic for discussion in the press.486 The park’s management had in the end no choice but to leave the contract in place with two thirds of the season to go, in order not to lose what they considered to be the park’s most popular attraction. They publically demanded that Axels improve service toward customers, but dismissed allegations of tax fraud and lower-than-union-negotiated wages by saying that they took Axels’ CEO as a man

484 Malmö stad, Tekniska nämndens arkiv, Green folder marked ‘Folkets park 2005’, Rumänska arbetare får dålig lön.

485 Malmö stad, Tekniska nämndens arkiv, Green folder marked ‘Folkets park 2005’, 9/5 2005; ‘Lo ställer in sin familjedag i Folkets park’, Kvällsposten, May 18th 2005, p. 12.

486 E.g. Sydsvenska Dagbladet, May 10th 2005, p. C6, ‘Märkliga turer på tivoli’; Sydsvenska Dagbladet, May 11th 2005, p. C2, ‘Språkförbistring på tivoli oroar’.

of his word when he declared that these accusations were nothing but rumors.487 Axels Tivoli thus managed to hang on to their Folkets park site, even if they had to take measures to appear less insensitive to the park’s historical labor movement heritage. That Axels’ 2005 commitments perhaps were less comprehensive than Projekt Folkets park wished can be seen in a letter dated 24 April 2006. In this brief note the park’s private security staff complained of an unlicensed and non-uniformed ‘night watch’ of untrained migrant workers guarding Axels’ fairground rides armed with illegal batons.488 Regular labor relations had clearly not been implemented, despite the company almost losing its best contract in the region because of the public relations catastrophe its employment strategy had caused.

The issue surfaced a few months later in a yearly poll through which the park’s management benchmarked its success rate in transforming the public’s opinions and experiences of the park. As noted in a debriefing meeting with the Projekt Folkets park group, 30% of the people polled that said that they had read or heard something negative about Folkets park mentioned ‘underpaid workers, untaxed wages, or a bad work environment’.489 This was indeed the only item identified by the poll that was brought up as an urban development problem by the meeting, but despite these representations of Axels’ less-than-ideal uses of the park, no concrete interventions were drawn up for the 2006 season. What had appeared as the best bid for including commercial forces in the park’s renewal in the winter of 2002 had within three years provoked bureaucratic representations demanding interventions if the renewal process was not to be derailed.

Those of Projekt Folkets park documents that have been archived from the mid 2000s contain few mentions of Axels Tivoli. Local newspapers are, however, dotted with articles illustrating how the company’s business practices continued to be a source of negative publicity for the park. Newspaper articles on the issue also give some insight into how the Projekt group responded to this — even if the actual process of representing this kind of use by planning bureaucrats cannot be discerned from this secondary source. The most serious issues reported concerned the safety of Axels’ customers, which continued to be a problem in years that followed. In July 2007 a municipal inspector found 40 different faults in Axels’

rides, including ‘electrical problems’ that could lead to ‘serious accidents’.490 A year later a serious accident in fact occurred when a 12-year-old child got stuck under a carousel car.491 The firm could not maintain the high level of safety they had promised, and despite renewed inspections two more accidents took place in

487 Sydsvenska Dagbladet, May 12th 2005, ‘Tivoliavtalet bryts inte’, p. C6.

488 Malmö stad, Arrangemangsenheten, Personal files of Sverker Haraldssson, Yttrande om privata

”nattvakter” i Folkets park, Malmö, 2006-04-24, 2006.

489 Malmö stad, Arrangemangsenheten, Personal files of Sverker Haraldssson, Styrgruppsmöte 2005-12-16.

490 Sydsvenska dagbladet, 10th July 2007, ‘Tivolit i Folkets park brister i elsäkerheten’, p. A1;

Sydsvenska dagbladet, 11th July 2007, ‘Rena tivolit’, p. A5.

491 Kvällsposten, 24th August 2008, ‘Barn skadades på Axels tivoli’, p. 24.